'Islamisation' Myth

DEBUNKING THE 'ISLAMISATION' MYTH ___________________________________________ Edmund Standing DEBUNKING THE ‘ISLAMISATION’ MYTH Why Britain Will Not Become an Islamic State ________________________________________ ________________________________________ About the author Edmund Standing is the author of The BNP and the Online Fascist Network (Centre for Social Cohesion, 2009) and co-author (with Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens) of Blood & Honour: Britain’s Far-Right Militants (Centre for Social Cohesion & Nothing British, 2010). CONTENTS Preface 3 Introduction 4 I Cultural Pessimism and the ‘Islamisation’ Myth 5 II The Myth of International Muslim Power 8 III The Myth of Muslim Power in Britain 12 IV The Myth of a ‘Demographic Time Bomb’ 25 Conclusion: Against the Culture of Despair 29 References 31 PREFACE I am an atheist, a secularist, and an anti-fascist. I have no interest in defending Islamic religious beliefs, nor the Qur’an (quite the opposite, in fact). I also have no time for those who seek to ‘understand’ Islamism or downplay the abhorrent nature of religious fascism. That said, I am also committed to a rational and just approach to my fellow human beings, seeking to treat them in the same way, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and so on. To think Islam as a set of beliefs is false and potentially dangerous is not the same thing at all as thinking that all Muslims are inherently dangerous or that I should view them as qualitatively different to other human beings. In the post-9/11 West, we have seen the worrying growth of a paranoid, bigoted approach to Muslims which increasingly views them as an undifferentiated mass, as an inherent Other, and as a powerful fifth column conspiring to destroy the West and enslave it to Sharia law. This approach to Muslims shares much in common with the approach to Jews found amongst those who believe the Protocols of Zion is an authentic document, and the ‘Islamisation’ myth is increasingly looking like a Muslim-themed variant of Protocols belief. In Britain, militant anti-Muslim bigotry has now reared its head in the form of the English Defence League, an organisation founded with the explicit aim of combating ‘Islamisation’. The EDL is an organisation that has been set up to fight a mythical enemy and, in failing to find this enemy, it seems inevitable that the next phase of the campaign will be to target Muslims as a whole, and there are strong indications that this is already happening. The ‘Islamisation’ myth, then, urgently needs debunking, and this report is my contribution to that effort. 3 INTRODUCTION Islam has invaded our culture, Muslims are on the verge of taking over Britain and creating an Islamic State. ‘Islamisation’ surrounds us, creeping Sharia is upon us. For many people today, such notions form an integral part of their world-view, but are they grounded in reality? In this text, I shall seek to counter the arguments of the proponents of the notion of ‘Islamisation’ by comparing these messages of doom with the reality of the situation in Britain today. The ‘Islamisation’ myth is a myth precisely because it is simply isn’t based on credible evidence. The idea that Britain is being ‘Islamised’ is the latest in a long line of Western narratives of cultural decline. It is a dangerous myth for reasons I shall outline below, and a myth that must be repudiated if we are to develop as a nation and articulate a positive vision for the future. 4 I CULTURAL PESSIMISM AND THE ‘ISLAMISATION’ MYTH Cultural pessimism has a long history and is perhaps most clearly represented today in the ‘Islamisation’ myth. A good example of contemporary cultural pessimism is found in the work of Melanie Phillips. Phillips writes of a ‘world turned upside down’, the West ‘taking leave of its senses’,1 and an ‘age of irrationality’2 in which the West is ‘sleepwalking into Islamisation’.3 She, and other writers with a similar outlook, are self-styled ‘defenders of national identity and traditional morality’;4 voices crying in the wilderness of a civilisation in decline. Such narratives of doom are persuasive because they offer easy explanations for the very real problems we face in modern society, yet they do so not by laying out a positive vision for the improvement of Western civilisation, but rather through a relentless condemnation of modernity as a degenerate negation of an imagined ideal culture of old. Such doom-laden assessments of the world have always been popular. Pessimism sells, and always has done. It is almost as though human beings thrive on fear and despair. As nothing is new about this, contemporary narratives of ‘Islamisation’ and Western decay have many historical antecedents. In the early Twentieth Century, Oswald Spengler wrote his influential text on ‘The Decline of the West’; today, Patrick Buchanan writes of ‘The Death of West’ and ‘How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Culture’. In a CATO policy report paper, Tyler Cowen offers the following brief history of cultural pessimism: Cultural pessimism has been around as long as culture. Pessimistic attacks have been leveled for centuries, although the target has changed frequently. Many moralists and philosophers, including Plato, criticized theater and poetry for their corrupting influence. Books became a target after the onset of publishing. Eighteenth-century pessimists accused novels of preventing readers from thinking, preaching disobedience to parents (note the contradictory charges), undermining women’s sense of subservience, breaking down class distinctions, and making readers sick. Libraries, especially privately run circulating libraries, were another target. Edward Mangin remarked in 1808, ‘There is scarcely a street of the metropolis, or a village in the country, in which a circulating library may not be found: nor is there a corner of the empire, where the English language is understood, that has not suffered from the effects of this institution’. In the 18th and 19th centuries the targets included epistolary romances, newspapers, opera, the music hall, photography, and instrumental virtuosi, such as Liszt and Paganini. The 20th century brought the scapegoats of radio, movies, modern art, professional sports, the automobile, television, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, comic books, MTV music videos, and rap music. Each new medium or genre has been accused of corrupting youth and promoting excess sensuality, political subversion, and moral relativism.5 Narratives of national and civilisational decline were widespread in the Nineteenth Century, as the rapid changes brought about by industrialisation and the growth of democracy invoked fears that a traditional, morally and culturally pure order was under attack. In 1892, Max Nordau’s book Degeneration6 was published and found a wide readership. For Nordau, modern art and the culture of the Fin de siècle were evidence of ‘the end of an established order, which for thousands of years 5 has satisfied logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something of beauty’. Nordau believed that: One epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and another is announcing its approach. There is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with to-day. Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and foil, because man is weary, and there is no faith that it is worth an effort to up-hold them. Views that have hitherto governed minds are dead or driven hence like disenthroned kings, and for their inheritance they that hold the titles and they that would usurp are locked in struggle. Many Nineteenth Century narratives of decline focussed on race. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories arose to explain the supposed degeneration of the West, with Jews presented as a ‘hidden hand’, an alien and parasitic force conspiring to destroy all that was good and pure. Such theories eventually reached their apotheosis in Nazi anti-Semitism and its pseudo-religious desire to exterminate the supposed root of Western decline. While Nineteenth Century race theorists and anti-Semites were often intellectuals who wrote for an elite audience, narratives of racial dissolution were also found in popular literature. Harry Brown writes of the popular American ‘Frontier Novels’ of the period: As these romances are confronted and confounded by the specter of miscegenation, they drift… into the nightmare world of the ‘gothic’, where racial hybridity is manifested not exactly as ‘silence’ but more sharply as madness, degeneracy, and horror. Within these novels we find an intersection of science and sensationalism as the widely-held racial theory of ‘diminishing fertility’ manifests itself in the romance as insanity or living death, the inevitable ‘curse’ invoked by the ‘unnatural’ mingling of white and Indian blood. The presence of misegenated women and ‘half-breed’ figures confounds the foundational categories of the national identity imagined by these romances – white and red, civilisation and nature, future and past – and consequently these figures are represented as irrational, perverse, or doomed, the recurring ‘nightmare’ invading America’s dream of itself.7 Such fantasies of decline based on race are no longer seen as credible, but new narratives of decline have arisen in their place. The ‘Islamisation’ myth is merely the newest manifestation of a long- running tradition of paranoid cultural pessimism. The Right is not alone in succumbing to paranoia about the modern world, and contemporary Leftist narratives of decline and apocalypse centre on globalisation and ecological catastrophe. Such narratives – of both Right and Left – are powerful not because they are entirely fictional, but rather because they mix factual elements (the integration of Muslims into Western culture is a process which has turned out to be far from easy, globalisation does have its losers, the natural environment is being damaged) with an overarching sense of despair about it all.

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